He says it’s because they call him dishonest, he says it’s okay to disagree with him. Not even remotely true.
You are allowed to disagree with Dave if and only if:
- You have been appropriately complimentary of him (preferably in your comment)
- You make sure to down-play your own opinion
- You make your point weakly or in a way that Dave feels is easy to rebut or explain away
If you disagree with him any other way, even if you are polite and correct, your comment will be deleted unless you’ve kissed his ass enough in the past. If not, kiss your comment goodbye. I know. I’ve had more comments deleted than I can count, and I go out of my way to be even and neutral when I venture over that direction.
I love this, though:
You may think I am dishonest, you can even say so (but be careful to be sure you’re right, and have the courage to put your name on it, only cowards make personal attacks anonymously) and do it in your space not mine.
“Be careful to be sure you’re right”… a (poorly) veiled threat. The next part, translated, says: “Don’t be anonymous, because if you are I can’t distract everyone from what you say by dragging you, personally, through the mud.”
Oh, Dave… you’re such an internet tough guy.
To be clear, though, I don’t think Dave is dishonest. I think he’s delusional.
I sent a comment into his moderation “river” re leopard’s firewall, in which I suggested (politely) that he misrepresented the linked article. Maybe I should have made it more clear. I didn’t think, and don’t think, that he was lying, intentionally. I think he was wrong about what the article said. I didn’t even stop to think why, before I posted my comment. Now that I’ve had a chance to think, I assume that it was because he was so focused on putting together his link-bait “Leopard is Windows” article, and so frustrated with Leopard’s apparent inability to handle networking his home “systems” (I shudder to think), that he just found a random article criticizing the firewall and assumed that it said what he thought. Dishonest? No. Delusional? No, actually. Just wrong. And, it now appears, functionally incapable of listening to actual criticism and responding to it like a grown up.
Not that I’m vain enough to think that I inspired the subsequent post. I’m sure he got hundreds of comments. Although, oddly, there are only twelve comments on the site at the moment, all of them remarkably consistent in their tone…
Winer doesn’t get hundreds of comments — a lot of the stuff he posts these days gets little to no response. His influence is on the wane, because he hasn’t create a program of any substance in years — just stuff he hacks together in a day or two and loses interest in.
Wow.
Now he’s released my comment. Along with about 60 others. I guess I should be pleased?
This site exists (in my opinion) so that people can comment on Dave’s internet persona and his blogged ideas.
He has a pattern of taking well meaning people and turning them into rabit anti-Winer critics.
Mark Pilgram invented the concept of the “Winer Number”… Google for it. Most of the active particiapnts here are have a Winer number of 1 multiplied by many qualifying events.
His current foray into having comments will work if he can have the controls he wishes and people don’t make a big deal about him removing comments as a high ratio of comments and removing posts that tie back to comments… like I think he did today.
At one time Mark Pilgrim would capture snapshots of Dave’s blog and document post edits and deletions that indicated Dave didn’t want to be held accountable for his words. He launched an attack on Mark for excessive “visits” to his site: consuming excess bandwidth.
Mark eventually realized that mud wrestling with Winer was futile and self-destructive. He took a year off from blogging and refocused on more positive pursuits. He wrote a book… he wrote a ton of code… he re-sync’ed with those he loves.
Winer moved forward and also tried to pick less public fights… but the scorpion can’t change it’s nature. It stings because it seems to need to keep it’s defenses sharp. The Internet never forgets.
The problem for me was this:
I posted a comment that I thought was useful, albeit vaguely critical. It never appeared. I have no idea how his moderation workflow is set up, so that was no big deal. But some comments did appear, followed by posts about how he was deleting comments that called him “dishonest,” etc. My assumption had to be, at that point, that my comment had been deleted for some reason.
Then he releases my comment, more than 24 hours later. Was he doing something else? Pondering his moderation philosophy? Who knows. All I know is that no one is very likely to respond not to the issues that I went to the thread to talk about, which was my point in going there.
Maybe this is the new software’s problem, who knows. The problem is, by engaging in this pull/push with people, he makes a sense of conflict almost inevitable.
Oh, and I love the bit further up, today, where he congratulates himself about a piece in Valleywag that’s actually making fun of him.
Entered on an iphone
Dave’s a micro-manager of most conversations: BloggerCon for example. BloggerCon as a format serves to allow Dave to stop a conversation and shuit someone down. He sees it as a value to the group to stop commercialization and excessive repetition of ideas but it seems to serve his need to be in control.
His new comment facility has the sames qualities: there’s a filtering process that smacks of the worst forms of censorship for his critics.
Comment here if you disagree and let Dave manage a lovely tea party on his blog. New miscreants will fid their way here after they seek to change Dave’s mind and learn that it’s often rusted shut.
full disclosure:
winer twitter:
“yikes there were a LOT of comments waiting for approval. they’re supposed to send email when a new comment comes in. or so i thought. oops. about 8 hours ago from web…”
Approving comments makes having comments a total chore. It’s a controlled forum and is only likely to offend people. They need to see their effort validated and the clock just ticks… everyone has days when they can’t check and then it offends someone.
I give the experiment 30 days max and then he’ll decalre the world unfit to communicate with.
Agreed re likely to offend. Moderation used to work on the usenet, when a forum was just one long threaded conversation. But a blog post sunsets fairly quickly. So, if there is a delay in approval, your comment becomes pointless pretty much over night. Which is annoying. In a context where you have reason to suspect suppression of your comment, it can be more than annoying.
Re Winer, his expressed moderation philosophy (“use your own bandwidth to complain, criticize, expand the discussion, or basically do anything other than engage in the conversation on my terms”) is his prerogative, but hardly a conversation starter.